She stared at it.
Taylor noticed her looking and covered the phone. “It’s for a client meeting tomorrow.”
She set the water down. “You brought cake into the house.”
“It’s not cake. It’s… pastries.”
“Are you hearing yourself?”
The CFO’s voice crackled faintly from the speaker. Taylor muted the line fully. “It’s one box in a refrigerator.”
“In a week where I’ve been trying not to rip my own skin off every time I walk past a bakery.”
He blinked, then glanced at the box, then back at her. “I didn’t think.”
“No,” she said. “You didn’t.”
The weariness of the day was already inside her. This tipped it over. “You say we’re doing this together, but you still get to step in and out of it whenever it suits you. You still get to have a normal appetite, normal body, normal distance.”
His expression sharpened. “That is not fair.”
“Neither is collapsing in an entryway because your heart can’t keep up.”
The words hung there, vicious and truer than she meant them. Taylor flinched as if she had slapped him.
He said, very quietly, “No. It isn’t.”
Maya hated herself immediately. She also hated that he made it harder to stay protected because he did not retaliate the way arrogant men usually did.
He took the box out of the fridge, walked to the trash compactor, and dropped it in without another word. Then he returned to the island, unmuted the call, and said to his CFO in a voice as cold as glass, “Reschedule tomorrow’s meeting. I’m no longer hosting.”
After he ended the call, Maya said, “That was dramatic.”
He met her eyes. “I was preventing myself from saying something unhelpful.”
She leaned against the counter, suddenly too tired to stand. “I’m sorry.”
“I know.” He came around the island more slowly this time. “Maya.”
She looked up.
“I will screw this up sometimes,” he said. “I’ll bring home the wrong thing. I’ll say the wrong thing. I’ll try to fix what can’t be fixed quickly because that’s the only skill set I’ve had for most of my life. But I am here. That part is not temporary.”
The word temporary landed differently now. It had once meant the length of the contract. Then it meant the phase of crisis. Now it carried some other threat neither of them was willing to name.
